RATED: MA21+Viewer discretion is strongly advised. This episode contains graphic depictions of suicidal ideation, suicide, and its immediate aftermath. It is not handled lightly. It is not handled quickly. It is handled honestly.
Utsu Enzu measured it on his third night here, lying flat on the floor because sleep hadn't come and the ceiling had a water stain shaped like a falling person and the floor felt more honest. Three of himself and a little extra. He filed the information away and has never once used it.
Outside, Tokyo continues. It always continues.
He is twenty-three. He has been in this apartment for eight months, since moving from Osaka with a single duffel bag and the vague intention of becoming someone the city didn't already have a record of. What he found instead was a desk on the fourteenth floor of a Shinjuku logistics company and a supervisor named Tanaka-san who has the face of a person who made peace with what he became a very long time ago and has never forgiven anyone around him for refusing to do the same.
"Enzu." Tanaka-san's voice comes from directly behind him on a Tuesday afternoon in late October, which means he has been standing there watching for a while before speaking. This is a habit. "Your output is seventeen percent below the morning average."
Utsu doesn't look up from the screen. "I'll catch up." "You said that yesterday." "Then I'll catch up twice."
The silence that follows has a specific texture — the controlled patience of a person deciding whether what he just heard is insubordination or just stupidity. Tanaka-san settles on neither and walks away, and Utsu stares at the data on the screen until the numbers stop meaning anything, which takes approximately four seconds.
The commute home is forty minutes on the Chuo line. He stands the whole way. A person across from him is asleep against the window with her mouth slightly open, and the person beside her is reading something on his phone with an expression of bottomless private misery, and nobody looks at anybody, which is the only social contract in Tokyo that has never once failed Utsu since he arrived.
He eats convenience store rice on the floor of the apartment because the table is being used to hold a pile of unopened mail he can't address yet.
"You should come back," his mother says, when she calls on a Wednesday evening. Her voice has the careful quality it always has now — measured, slightly too gentle, like she's handling something she dropped once before. "Osaka isn't what you think it is. Your father and I—"
"I'm fine here." "You don't sound fine." "I'm tired. There's a difference." A pause. The specific pause of a parent who knows the difference and is choosing not to say so. "You can always come home. That's all I'm saying."
"I know. Thank you."
He hangs up. He sits with the phone in his hand for a moment. He thinks about Osaka — the other apartment, the narrow couch, the television show they used to watch together when he was ten or eleven and the world still had coordinates he could locate himself inside of. Nishi no Shisha. Messenger of the West. Low-budget and melodramatic, the same five locations recycled across forty episodes, a Japanese actor in a ten-gallon hat riding a rented horse through the Tottori sand dunes and pretending they were Arizona. He had memorized every episode. His father would laugh at the wrong moments, too loudly, and his mother would lean into him slightly when something tense was building, and Utsu would sit between them and feel exactly where he was in the world.
Then they stopped coming to the couch. The show ended its run. He sat in front of the dark screen at eleven years old and understood something that would spend the next twelve years finding its correct language.
He puts the phone down. He doesn't call back.
There is a grey cat in the building. Gray cat. It sits outside his door sometimes, and he knows because he can hear the particular sound of it shifting its weight on the linoleum. He has stood on the other side of that door three times this week and waited until the sound of it leaving came through the wood.
On the Thursday night, the last Thursday night, the garbage truck comes at eleven-thirty and he can hear it from the floor where he is sitting with his back against the wall below the window.
He is not crying. He thought maybe he would be, at some point in the hours preceding this, but by the time a decision like this finishes forming, there is usually not much water left in it. He is just tired in the specific, bureaucratic way that has nothing to do with sleep — the tiredness of a calculation run too many times that keeps returning the same answer.
His phone lights up on the floor beside him. A coworker. The one who has smiled at him too consistently to be meaningless — Hayashi, from the third row, who twice left a wrapped onigiri on his desk without attribution and once said you doing okay, Enzu? in the elevator in the tone of someone who actually wanted to know. He has stepped back from every one of those moments.
He watches the screen light up and go dark. Light up. Go dark. He doesn't pick it up.
He does not write a note. There is no one he needs to tell anything. His parents will be notified eventually and he is sorry for that — genuinely, flatly sorry, the way you're sorry for an inconvenience you're causing someone you can't figure out how to reach anymore. He doesn't think a note helps. He doesn't think there is anything to say that the room won't say on its own.
He stands up once to look out the window.
Tokyo from this height is genuinely extraordinary — all lit arteries and stacked towers, the red warning lights on the high buildings blinking patient and regular as a pulse. Eight million people, all continuing. It is beautiful. He has lived here eight months and looked out this window hundreds of times and he is only now, in the last few minutes of looking at anything, registering that it is beautiful.
He lies down on the floor. The last thing his eyes find is the water stain on the ceiling. He closes them. The light arrives with violence.
Not the abstract violence of pain — the physical assault of a brightness that comes from everywhere at once, a sun that has never in his life been this close or this direct. His hands — small, they are small, they are scrabbling at dry earth and coarse grass — press flat against ground that is warm from a whole day of baking in heat he doesn't have a reference for, and the smell of it comes up through his palms: mineral, ancient, nothing like November in Tokyo.
He opens his eyes all the way and the world cracks open into blue sky and dust and an enormous yellow-gold prairie plain that stretches in every direction until it finds the horizon and keeps going.
He looks at his hands.
The part of him that is still Utsu Enzu — still twenty-three, still the floor of the apartment, still the garbage truck on a Thursday — cannot immediately process this, and so it simply files it as one more strange thing and waits.
He is six years old. He knows this the way you know your own identity. "Yasei!"
The voice comes from behind him — a mothers voice, near and unhurried, carrying across open air with the ease of someone who has called this name from this distance many times.
He turns around.
The house is timber-framed and modest, built in pieces over time, additions bolted to the original structure with the practical improvisation of people who construct what they need as they need it. A vegetable garden runs along the eastern face. A fence line marks the property's edge where it meets the open plains. From the nearest window, warm light spills out into the cooling late-afternoon air.
The adult in the doorway is in her mid-thirties. Practical face. Hands that have worked. Hair pulled back without thought because there is too much else to think about. She is looking at him with the specific fond exasperation of a parent whose child is, again, sitting in the dirt.
"Supper's on. What are you doing all the way out there?"
Utsu Enzu — Yasei Nishi — does not answer. Cannot. His English is inside him somewhere, assembled from eight months of Osaka school curriculum and a wild west show with English subtitles, but his mouth is confused and the entire architecture of what has just happened is still processing in real time.
She comes down the porch steps. Crosses to him. Kneels, and her hands — rough and genuinely warm — hold his face. "Hey. What's wrong? You look white as a sheet."
He looks at her. Her eyes are brown and direct and she is waiting for him without impatience, which is its own kind of thing. Behind her, the sky over the plains is going gold and long, the specific orange-purple of last light spreading across a horizon that has no buildings in it, and it is the exact color of the end of every episode of Nishi no Shisha — the gunfighter walking into the sun, the credits rolling, his father too-loud beside him and his mother leaning slightly in.
Something cracks open in his heart. Quietly. Without drama. Just a thing giving way. "I don't know," he says. His voice comes out heaved. Her expression shifts into something softer. "Did you fall? Are you hurt somewhere?"
"No." "Bad dream?" He almost says yes and then doesn't, because the word for what this is doesn't exist yet. "I don't know," he says again.
She pulls him gently to his feet. Brushes the dirt from his knees with the automatic thoroughness of someone who has done this many times before. Her hands on his arms are steady and she doesn't let go immediately and he stands very still inside this — inside the specific fact of being held upright by another person — and tries to remember the last time. Tries to find it anywhere in the last twelve years of being Utsu Enzu, who stepped backward, who rejected society, who let the phone go dark.
He can't find it. "Come on," she says. "Your father's already eaten half his biscuit waiting." She takes his hand and walks him toward the house.
Inside, the warmth is immediate and real — a wood stove burning steadily in the corner, something on the table that smells like meat and bread, a lamp throwing orange light across rough-hewn walls covered in the functional evidence of lives being lived: tools hanging on nails, a calendar, a child's drawing pinned near the window with no particular care.
His father is at the table. A large, quiet adult and hands that are even rougher than his mothers seemed to be, sitting with his elbows on the wood and his biscuit half-gone, exactly as predicted. He looks up when they come in.
"There he is." His voice is low. Easy. "Thought you'd gone and joined the coyotes." "He was sitting in the yard looking like he'd seen a ghost," his mother says, guiding Yasei into the chair across from him.
His father looks at him with a directness that is not demanding anything. Just looking. "You alright, son?" Son. The word lands somewhere without a floor.
"Yes sir," Yasei says. Automatically. Correctly. The sir emerging from somewhere inside the show's forty episodes, from every dubbed frontier scene he ever watched from a couch in Osaka.
His father's mouth quirks slightly. He slides the bread basket across the table. "Eat something. You're pale."
His mother sits down and passes something and the lamplight moves when the stove pops and outside the prairie wind comes up against the window with a long, low sound that has nothing apologetic in it, and the three of them are at this table and the room is warm and this is real.
Utsu Enzu spent twelve years learning to step backward from every warm room he could find.
He picks up the bread. He takes a bite. It is the best thing he has ever tasted and he doesn't understand why and his eyes are doing something he cannot stop and he fixes them on the table.
"Hey." His mother's hand covers his on the table. Warm. Immediate. "It's alright. Whatever it is — it's alright." He nods. He cannot speak.
Outside, the last of the sun disappears below the plains. The frontier goes dark the way it always goes dark — completely, without ceremony, without acknowledging what the light meant to anyone who was watching it.
But inside the lamp is burning. And for the first time in two lives, Utsu Enzu is sitting at a table where someone is waiting to pass him the bread. He does not know yet what it costs to love something in this world. He will.
TO BE CONTINUED...